Kepeng Xu

Wenbin Zou, Tianyi Li, Kejun Wu et al.

This paper reports on the NTIRE 2026 Challenge on Bitstream-Corrupted Video Restoration (BSCVR). The challenge aims to advance research on recovering visually coherent videos from corrupted bitstreams, whose decoding often produces severe spatial-temporal artifacts and content distortion. Built upon recent progress in bitstream-corrupted video recovery, the challenge provides a common benchmark for evaluating restoration methods under realistic corruption settings. We describe the dataset, evaluation protocol, and participating methods, and summarize the final results and main technical trends. The challenge highlights the difficulty of this emerging task and provides useful insights for future research on robust video restoration under practical bitstream corruption.

Kepeng Xu, Li Xu, Gang He et al.

Multiple complex degradations are coupled in low-quality video faces in the real world. Therefore, blind video face restoration is a highly challenging ill-posed problem, requiring not only hallucinating high-fidelity details but also enhancing temporal coherence across diverse pose variations. Restoring each frame independently in a naive manner inevitably introduces temporal incoherence and artifacts from pose changes and keypoint localization errors. To address this, we propose the first blind video face restoration approach with a novel parsing-guided temporal-coherent transformer (PGTFormer) without pre-alignment. PGTFormer leverages semantic parsing guidance to select optimal face priors for generating temporally coherent artifact-free results. Specifically, we pre-train a temporal-spatial vector quantized auto-encoder on high-quality video face datasets to extract expressive context-rich priors. Then, the temporal parse-guided codebook predictor (TPCP) restores faces in different poses based on face parsing context cues without performing face pre-alignment. This strategy reduces artifacts and mitigates jitter caused by cumulative errors from face pre-alignment. Finally, the temporal fidelity regulator (TFR) enhances fidelity through temporal feature interaction and improves video temporal consistency. Extensive experiments on face videos show that our method outperforms previous face restoration baselines. The code will be released on \href{https://github.com/kepengxu/PGTFormer}{https://github.com/kepengxu/PGTFormer}.

Kepeng Xu, Li Xu, Gang He et al.

Vision-language models typically reason over post-ISP RGB images, although RGB rendering can clip, suppress, or quantize sensor evidence before inference. We study whether grounding improves when the visual interface is moved closer to the underlying camera measurement. We formulate measurement-grounded vision-language learning and instantiate it as PRISM-VL, which combines RAW-derived Meas.-XYZ inputs, camera-conditioned grounding, and Exposure-Bracketed Supervision Aggregation for transferring supervision from RGB proxies to measurement-domain observations. Using a quality-controlled 150K instruction-tuning set and a held-out benchmark targeting low-light, HDR, visibility-sensitive, and hallucination-sensitive cases, PRISM-VL-8B reaches 0.6120 BLEU, 0.4571 ROUGE-L, and 82.66\% LLM-Judge accuracy, improving over the RGB Qwen3-VL-8B baseline by +0.1074 BLEU, +0.1071 ROUGE-L, and +4.46 percentage points. These results suggest that part of VLM grounding error arises from information lost during RGB rendering, and that preserving measurement-domain evidence can improve multimodal reasoning.

Wei Chen, Zhao Zhang, Meng Yuan et al.

In this paper, we address the task of targeted sentiment analysis (TSA), which involves two sub-tasks, i.e., identifying specific aspects from reviews and determining their corresponding sentiments. Aspect extraction forms the foundation for sentiment prediction, highlighting the critical dependency between these two tasks for effective cross-task knowledge transfer. While most existing studies adopt a multi-task learning paradigm to align task-specific features in the latent space, they predominantly rely on coarse-grained knowledge transfer. Such approaches lack fine-grained control over aspect-sentiment relationships, often assuming uniform sentiment polarity within related aspects. This oversimplification neglects contextual cues that differentiate sentiments, leading to negative transfer. To overcome these limitations, we propose FCKT, a fine-grained cross-task knowledge transfer framework tailored for TSA. By explicitly incorporating aspect-level information into sentiment prediction, FCKT achieves fine-grained knowledge transfer, effectively mitigating negative transfer and enhancing task performance. Experiments on three datasets, including comparisons with various baselines and large language models (LLMs), demonstrate the effectiveness of FCKT. The source code is available on https://github.com/cwei01/FCKT.

Zheng Chen, Jingkai Wang, Kai Liu et al.

This paper provides a review of the NTIRE 2025 challenge on real-world face restoration, highlighting the proposed solutions and the resulting outcomes. The challenge focuses on generating natural, realistic outputs while maintaining identity consistency. Its goal is to advance state-of-the-art solutions for perceptual quality and realism, without imposing constraints on computational resources or training data. The track of the challenge evaluates performance using a weighted image quality assessment (IQA) score and employs the AdaFace model as an identity checker. The competition attracted 141 registrants, with 13 teams submitting valid models, and ultimately, 10 teams achieved a valid score in the final ranking. This collaborative effort advances the performance of real-world face restoration while offering an in-depth overview of the latest trends in the field.

Kepeng Xu, Zijia Ma, Li Xu et al.

Recent advances in neural camera imaging pipelines have demonstrated notable progress. Nevertheless, the real-world imaging pipeline still faces challenges including the lack of joint optimization in system components, computational redundancies, and optical distortions such as lens shading.In light of this, we propose an end-to-end camera imaging pipeline (RealCamNet) to enhance real-world camera imaging performance. Our methodology diverges from conventional, fragmented multi-stage image signal processing towards end-to-end architecture. This architecture facilitates joint optimization across the full pipeline and the restoration of coordinate-biased distortions. RealCamNet is designed for high-quality conversion from RAW to RGB and compact image compression. Specifically, we deeply analyze coordinate-dependent optical distortions, e.g., vignetting and dark shading, and design a novel Coordinate-Aware Distortion Restoration (CADR) module to restore coordinate-biased distortions. Furthermore, we propose a Coordinate-Independent Mapping Compression (CIMC) module to implement tone mapping and redundant information compression. Existing datasets suffer from misalignment and overly idealized conditions, making them inadequate for training real-world imaging pipelines. Therefore, we collected a real-world imaging dataset. Experiment results show that RealCamNet achieves the best rate-distortion performance with lower inference latency.

Gang He, Kepeng Xu, Li Xu et al.

The rise of HDR-WCG display devices has highlighted the need to convert SDRTV to HDRTV, as most video sources are still in SDR. Existing methods primarily focus on designing neural networks to learn a single-style mapping from SDRTV to HDRTV. However, the limited information in SDRTV and the diversity of styles in real-world conversions render this process an ill-posed problem, thereby constraining the performance and generalization of these methods. Inspired by generative approaches, we propose a novel method for SDRTV to HDRTV conversion guided by real HDRTV priors. Despite the limited information in SDRTV, introducing real HDRTV as reference priors significantly constrains the solution space of the originally high-dimensional ill-posed problem. This shift transforms the task from solving an unreferenced prediction problem to making a referenced selection, thereby markedly enhancing the accuracy and reliability of the conversion process. Specifically, our approach comprises two stages: the first stage employs a Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network to capture HDRTV priors, while the second stage matches these priors to the input SDRTV content to recover realistic HDRTV outputs. We evaluate our method on public datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness with significant improvements in both objective and subjective metrics across real and synthetic datasets.

Li Xu, Siqi Wang, Kepeng Xu et al.

High-Dynamic-Range Wide-Color-Gamut (HDR-WCG) technology is becoming increasingly widespread, driving a growing need for converting Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) content to HDR. Existing methods primarily rely on fixed tone mapping operators, which struggle to handle the diverse appearances and degradations commonly present in real-world SDR content. To address this limitation, we propose a generalized SDR-to-HDR framework that enhances robustness by learning attribute-disentangled representations. Central to our approach is Realistic Attribute-Disentangled Representation Learning (RealRep), which explicitly disentangles luminance and chrominance components to capture intrinsic content variations across different SDR distributions. Furthermore, we design a Luma-/Chroma-aware negative exemplar generation strategy that constructs degradation-sensitive contrastive pairs, effectively modeling tone discrepancies across SDR styles. Building on these attribute-level priors, we introduce the Degradation-Domain Aware Controlled Mapping Network (DDACMNet), a lightweight, two-stage framework that performs adaptive hierarchical mapping guided by a control-aware normalization mechanism. DDACMNet dynamically modulates the mapping process via degradation-conditioned features, enabling robust adaptation across diverse degradation domains. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RealRep consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both generalization and perceptually faithful HDR color gamut reconstruction.